Prospects of hybrid cooling technologies for thermal management of electronic gadgets: A review
Rakesh Nandan, Venugopal Arumuru, Mihir Kumar Das
Abstract
The scientific community continues to grapple with the problem of undesired heat generation in electrical devices caused by miniaturisation and the growing number of transistors on silicon chips. Therefore, the rise in operating temperature leads to decreased reliability of the electronic components, resulting in poor performance or frequent failure. Many cooling techniques, including active, passive, and hybrid, have emerged to tackle this challenge over time. The hybrid cooling approach has been found to offer a trade-off between the two. Although different active and passive cooling techniques have been analysed individually, no analysis of hybrid cooling techniques is available. This study aims to evaluate the prospects of various hybrid cooling technologies reported in the literature throughout the past decade. This study classifies the different hybrid cooling techniques into three distinct groups: (i) Passive – Passive (P-P), (ii) Active – Passive (A-P), and (iii) Active – Active (A-A) hybrid cooling techniques. A detailed analysis of the cooling techniques is done by evaluating their thermal performance in terms of thermal resistance, base temperature, compactness, and operating heat flux range. In the current analysis, it is found that the thermal resistance lies within the range of 0.8 –8.4 K/W, 0.0118 – 2.6 K/W, and 0.02 – 0.5 K/W for P – P, A – P, and A – A hybrid cooling techniques, respectively. At the same time, the heat dissipation per unit volume is found to be within the range of 0.05 – 1.4 W/cm 3 , 0.005 – 15.28 W/cm 3 , and 0.6 – 4.54 W/cm 3 for P – P, A – P, and A – A hybrid cooling techniques, respectively. Lastly, future research directions with potential solutions have been presented. This review aims to provide the designer with valuable information for choosing a hybrid cooling system that best suits their requirements.